Missouri didn’t get justice with Kevin Johnson’s execution. It took immoral vengeance

Missouri’s recent execution of Kevin Johnson by lethal injection conjures a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot.” The story’s protagonist describes how he would paint a picture of a man being put to death by guillotine, which he witnessed in France. It still proves apt today:

“The convict’s face as white as paper; the priest holding up the cross, the man greedily putting forward his blue lips (to kiss the cross) and looking — aware of everything. The cross and the head, that’s the picture. The priest’s face and the executioner’s, his attendants and a few heads and eyes below might be painted in the background, in half light.”

The contrast between Christianity and eye-for-an-eye retribution perhaps explains our equivocation over the morality and the efficacy of the death penalty. But no matter how one tries to justify it, the entire process taints everyone involved — beginning with elected officials who enact the laws that legalize the death penalty, the prosecutors who pursue it, the jurors who approve it, the appellate judges whose conviction to uphold the law affirm it, to our current governor, who washed his hands when he declined to commute Johnson’s death sentence to life imprisonment, and instead released this terse statement:

“The violent murder of any citizen, let alone a Missouri law enforcement officer, should be met only with the fullest punishment state law allows. Through Mr. Johnson’s own heinous actions, he stole the life of Sergeant (William) McEntee and left a family grieving, a wife widowed, and children fatherless. Clemency will not be granted.”

No one doubted Kevin Johnson was guilty, and that his crime — ambushing the police officer, then assassinating the helpless, wounded man with a bullet to the back of the head — defined “heinous.” All that remained in that awful aftermath centered squarely on societal punishment of life imprisonment or the death penalty. And so the state executed Johnson this past Tuesday.

We hear that revenge is a dish best served cold. But revenge via the execution of Johnson 17 years after his horrible crime cannot assuage the terrible suffering and permanent sense of loss endured by McEntee’s loved ones. Society’s vengeful act in kind accomplishes nothing for the victim’s family.

The specious argument that the death penalty deters crime remains wishful thinking that we would all live in a safer world if the killers were killed. But research long ago established that criminals do not weigh a life sentence in jail versus the death penalty when contemplating murder.

The overall financial expense of the pursuit of the death penalty — with the expenditures for prosecutors and public defenders, the drain on judicial resources during repeated appeals to state and federal appellate courts, and the employment of death row guards and executioners — undercuts the contention that the death penalty somehow saves taxpayers money compared to a life sentence. Debatable savings of the state’s lucre seems a perverse way to define society’s mores.

It remains easy to be in favor of the death penalty without being personally involved in the gruesome details involved in state-sanctioned killing, which runs afoul of both legal and Judeo-Christian law. Murder in both the first or second degree involves the premeditated killing of a person with malice aforethought — which by definition describes the death penalty, where the state premeditates and painstakingly establishes the means to kill the killer. Tacking on an exemption for murder for the state makes no legal or moral sense.

Death vengeance retribution neither makes us safer nor brings back the dead. Instead, state-sanctioned executions make us coldly indifferent to those workers in the criminal justice system who act as our proxies in jobs that involve strapping a condemned man down, his arms outstretched to form a cross, and injecting him with lethal poison.

Missourians should practice what we preach by abolishing the death penalty. Incarcerate heinous criminals for life without a chance for parole, so they can spend their lives in the living hell of a maximum-security prison awaiting final judgment in the hereafter.

Paul W. Lore is an attorney in the St. Louis area. He previously lived in Kansas City for 13 years.